by Kenny Moore
It was a measure of how objective Pre had become that he told Bill no, he now realized those guys were good. If he’d led all the way, he’d have been vulnerable at the end, just like a Ron Clarke. He said there really wasn’t much he could have done differently.
“Except be a different breed of cat,” laughed Bill, “and run for third.”
“Yeah, right,” said Pre. “No chance of that.”
Later, Bowerman was a little too rosy when he told Tom Jordan, Prefontaine’s biographer, “He recognized he was a kid running among men and the longer distance races are men’s races. I don’t know of any distance performer who is not better at twenty-five than he was at eighteen to twenty-two, if he stays healthy. He recognized his time was ahead of him.”
All this was true, and Pre voiced it too, though without his former obsessive sense of destiny. Still, Dellinger and Bowerman saw Pre wasn’t bouncing back. He was moody, hopping from emotion to emotion. Mary Marckx Creel, who would call Munich “a turning point” in Pre’s life, saw that, too. Pre began partying and drinking much more than he used to, Creel would say, and seemed to take running less seriously. It may have begun to occur to him, on some level, that he might need to consider making a living at something besides track. Creel came to feel he was resisting that possibility: “It took a lot of talking to get him back to being responsible again. I had to threaten to leave him.”
Creel had known Prefontaine since February 1971, when he was a sophomore and she a freshman. They had met when he came to study in her dorm with a mutual friend, had seen blonde, dryly dubious Mary, and asked, in the manner of Mike Frankovich meeting Barbara Young, where she had been all his life. The relationship had blossomed after Mary told him she wasn’t his type and he, taken aback, had set out to prove her wrong, whatever it took. It took paying some attention to politics.
“At first,” Creel would say, “Steve was a pretty die-hard, conservative, rah-rah-USA guy.” When they heard Senator Wayne Morse speak at a rally about ending the war in Vietnam, Pre was angry with the protesters because they alienated alumni, who then gave less money to the university and the athletic program. “He got mad,” Creel would remember. “Then he got older.”
Some of that aging took place in the Mac Court sauna in the spring of 1971. Arne Kvalheim, who had returned to get his master’s in journalism, held up a soggy newspaper. The headline was “B-52 Missions, Tonnage Increase.”
“The generals,” Kvalheim read, “say we have not yet inflicted that level of pain, short of annihilation, under which reasonable people will see it’s in their interest to accept our terms.”
Pre closed his eyes, sick of the subject.
“So,” asked Arne, “what would that level be in Coos Bay?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“How much would an enemy have to bomb before Coos Bay would give up?”
“Coos Bay would never give up.”
“It would hate to, but there must be some point, if your bridges are gone, your mills are gone, your food is gone, half your families are dead, there’s absolutely no hope of. . .”
“Coos Bay would never give up! They’d fight to the last man!”
Arne sat back. “Of course they would,” he said. “Oslo would. Dallas would. No one would give up.”
“So what’s your point?”
“Just to wonder, in this war of yours, why you expect the people of North Vietnam not to fight invaders as hard as the people of Coos Bay. The more you bomb human beings defending home and family, the more they fight to the last man.” There was a long moment of deepening hopelessness.
“It’s not my war, Arne!” said Pre finally. “Stop calling it my war!”
Student draft deferments were ended in 1971 and the Selective Service System instituted a lottery. Pre drew a relatively low draft lottery number, which meant a correspondingly higher chance of being called. At that point, Mary Creel would remember, “For him, and a lot of his friends, the war got a lot closer to home.” If Prefontaine had been drafted, he could have run for the Army track team as other Ducks had, but he told Creel he didn’t want to have anything to do with the military.
“He knew he’d never be able to take orders,” she recalled more than thirty years later. “If it was hard to take orders from Bowerman, whom he respected and loved in a convoluted way, how could he take them from some drill sergeant?”
In 1973, after more than two decades of quagmire, the US withdrew from Vietnam. The draft ended the same year, and young men of Pre’s age could exhale and turn their attention to domestic issues.
Pre himself gradually began to remember that he loved running and winning, that the Olympics were not the only, or even the main, reason he ran. As he became excited about the possibilities of life again, Kvalheim helped keep the excitement in check. During one run, Pre proudly reported that Coos Bay was naming a street after him. “What are they going to call it?” Arne shot back, “Fourth Street?”
Tough as it was for Prefontaine to regain his former eagerness, it was tougher for Bill Bowerman. The man who had been such a rock for everyone in Munich came home exhausted and discouraged. He felt that “all the guff he had taken from the Olympic officials,” Barbara would say, “defeated what he had tried to do there.” He put up a good front for the sake of team and family, hoping the ancient rhythms of timing workouts and making shoes would restore his vigor.
Before they took effect, the city of Eugene’s fire marshal informed the university that Hayward Field’s west grandstand along the homestretch was no longer patchable. The 5,000-seat structure, built in 1919, would have to be torn down after the 1973 season. If the Oregon Track Club hoped to host further Olympic trials, new stands would have to be built.
Neither the athletic department nor the university had funds for this. Bowerman’s boss was young athletic director Norv Ritchey, who had taken over from Len Casanova in 1969. Ritchey, a baseball man from tiny Yoncalla, Oregon, about forty-five miles south of Eugene, had asked Bill to be his assistant AD, and they had worked well together. Ritchey was sympathetic to building a new structure for the track program. But in a year of recession and Arab oil embargo, there was no money. Raising it would be an enormous task. “It was impossible,” Bill said later, “to do justice to my coaching and to a big construction project at the same time. And we didn’t have much time.”
So, without a word of warning, he retired. After twenty-five years in the chair of Bill Hayward, Bowerman at the age of sixty-two announced that, effective the end of the year, he was leaving to do the greatest good for the greatest number by chairing a drive to restore the facility.
Ritchey asked Bill to help him find a replacement. “He said, give me three names,” Bowerman would recall. “I put them in this order: Bob Newland, South Eugene High coach Harry Johnson, and Bill Dellinger. Dellinger was already on the job.”
Ritchey didn’t interview any of them. Instead, he sat with Bill and they made the selection jointly, without much regard, apparently, for the order Bill had ranked them. As they talked, it became clear that the need was for a candidate able to weather changing times. “Without question,” said Ritchey in 2005, “the toughest decade for college coaches, presidents, and athletic directors was the 1970s.” War protests bled into free speech and civil rights protests, which bled into hair and dress protests. President Clark and his wife Opal—veterans of Harry Edwards’s campaigns at San Jose State—once disarmed an angry delegation of Black Panthers by bravely inviting them into the president’s mansion for tea and cookies.
Every coach in every sport faced challenges to his authority. Bowerman confided to Ritchey that he’d had a few athletes announce that they ran for the university, but not him. He welcomed rigorous academic questioning (once he felt the questioner had earned the right to ask). But more and more often, he felt, young men sought confrontation for its own sake.
The job contender who benefited most from these concerns was Bill Dellinger. “Bill was clearly capable of handling the
authority situation of the 1970s,” said Ritchey. “Bowerman said, ‘He can sure do it better than I can.’”
I, having been coached in high school by the winning and unflappable Bob Newland, remain surprised Bowerman hadn’t judged Newland superior in adjusting to the new freedom. “I think,” said Ritchey, “Bill felt Bob Newland might have had as little patience with that as Bill himself.”
In any case, Dellinger was soon appointed. He was confident he was up to the job, but was sobered by the suddenness of his elevation—and by what an act he had to follow. “There is no way for me ever to be Bill Bowerman,” he said. “I can only be Bill Dellinger carrying on the lessons and legacy of Bowerman and Hayward. Which I pledge to do until I drop.” Dellinger and Bowerman divided their labor that last season. Dellinger took on more of the program’s administration. Bowerman marshaled a great community effort.
At a breakfast meeting of the Oregon Track Club board, most of whom were still buzzing from the Olympic Trials experience, Bowerman announced that if they wanted to partake of such glory again, they had to have financing, blueprints, and contractors set to go in a year. University architect Jon Kahananui had made a preliminary estimate that the cost of new stands would be $600,000. Bowerman asked the OTC board members to join him in each pledging two percent of the target, $30,000 apiece, either their own or cash squeezed from other sources. He compiled a five-page, single-spaced list of every business or professional person in town. Beside each target cow was the worker who’d volunteered or been assigned to milk it. Bill scrawled an exhortation on a memo that said it all: “Give it or get it!” Their own giving, he stressed, was necessary if they were to go hat in hand to major prospects.
By November 1973, the total of pledges and checks exceeded the $600,000 goal. John Amundson, of the Lutes and Amundson architectural firm, had drawn up a cunning, steel-supported, 7,500-seat plan that matched the original stands’ shape, but extended the roofed stands past the finish line and halfway around the south turn. Bids were sought from area contractors. Then, as Bowerman would put it, “like bad relatives the bids came in.” The worldwide oil shortage had caused structural steel prices to leap. The lowest contractor’s bid was $807,549. All the submissions had to be rejected and the project rethought.
Bill and committee didn’t go back to the drawing board so much as they lifted their eyes to a resource being trucked past daily on Franklin Boulevard—immense laminated Douglas fir beams, the pride of the Oregon wood products industry. Bowerman and Amundson asked state and city building authorities to consider granting a code variance so such beams could be used in a new design. The appeal was granted.
Four major makers (Weyerhaeuser, Rosboro, Bohemia, and Duco-Lam) came through with majestic beams that were so strong they could be cantilevered out over the practice track in back and support a roof over the new stands that didn’t need to look like an old covered bridge. Amundson abandoned the section around the turn and cut the design to five bays, seating just under 5,000. But the great change was the upturned angle of the roof. It would make those 5,000 feel as if they’d been sitting in an old parka for years and now the hood had been pulled back—they would see the Coburg Hills beyond the east stands.
The project was rolling, but to Bowerman’s ongoing chagrin, it incurred pressure from every agenda in town. These included the university administration (even the redoubtable Robert Clark didn’t want donors milked dry right before the start of a major endowment campaign), athletic director Ritchey (who loved free capital improvement, but wouldn’t spend a dime of the department budget to put in decent toilets), coaches of other sports, the track club, businesspeople, and building contractors. Bill had to deal with them all. By February 1974, he was writing a memo to himself, asking, “Am I equal to the task of pursuing this project? I have the feeling that the various echelons of the university such as the Physical Plant, Business Office, Athletic Department, Development Fund, and other administrators wish that this project would go away.”
His committee, and his nature, prevailed on him to continue. Few were better suited to plow through the morass. In much the way that Bowerman loved and distrusted his athletes, he loved and distrusted his university. Improving it was possible, but it was like hacking back blackberry thickets in a swampy pasture: You would come out bleeding. People would lie and prevaricate and stall and bluff and bluster and drive you mad with the intensity of how they felt things had to be done. And you had to not let them.
Bill detailed a tiny sample of his tribulations in a letter to Otto Frohnmayer. The focus of Bill’s ire was the UO business manager. He was also no great fan of Bowerman’s for reasons that seemed to stem from Bill’s not giving the man’s son a track scholarship. When the fund drive began, wrote Bill, “He indicated to me that he believed the Business Office and/or the Development Fund should take ten percent off the top for ‘operation.’ ‘The practice,’ he said, ‘is similar to the Federal Grants.’ I indicated that this would be done over my dead body.”
Later, when pledges were falling short of the $679,617 low-bid contract with the V. A. Harding Company, Bowerman asked the business manager how much more was needed; $100,000 was the answer. Bill went to his pal, Seneca Lumber’s Aaron Jones, who came through with that amount. Ten days later, the business manager told Bill that “an error had been made” and asked him to ask Jones for more. “I told him to go to Hell,” Bill wrote. “I would find some other way, but I was not going to look like a fool or a beggar to a man who had gotten us off the rock.” There was more, all irritating and, to Bowerman’s mind, petty in the extreme, from “the man who thinks he is chancellor.”
These aggravations explain Bill’s fervor whenever he spoke to his teams about Oregon philanthropy. When the day came that we would want to spend our hard-earned money not on trips to Europe or home and family but on the very university out of which many were in jeopardy of flunking, he’d say, we had to promise him that we wouldn’t write a check to the university’s general pot. That was like writing a check to the USOC’s general pot and expecting it to trickle down to the athletes. No, we’d write it to the Development Fund, a foundation that the university had set up to accept gifts for specified ends.
Bill made us swear we would direct our money to the business school, to the writing program, to the biology department for teaching fellowships, whatever we felt was important—even the track team. “That,” he said, “is the only way to know and control where your gift is being spent.”
The new stands, then, were a donation from the Oregon Track Club to the university via the Development Fund, which held and disbursed the monies as needed. The old stands were torn down, leaving a big hole filled with seep water. In the spring of 1974, the Oregon crowd would watch meets from only one side of the track, the former backstretch. It was hoped the new ones would be done before the rains set in that winter.
The restoration project took all of Bill’s energy and time. He certainly wasn’t retiring because there was no more talent to cultivate. Three-miler Paul Geis—who had transferred from Rice after being astounded to find at the Olympic Trials that a whole city cared intensely about what he did—was running so well in his redshirt year as to worry Prefontaine. And the talent wasn’t only on the track. Mac Wilkins, Prefontaine’s classmate, who had gone on to break the Oregon freshman javelin record with 257 feet, had switched to the discus after an injured elbow precluded his throwing the spear. He was now improving in his new event by prodigious bounds.
“I went to Oregon because my coaches in high school couldn’t be honest with me,” Mac once declared. “They told me, ‘Football will make a man out of you.’ When it didn’t, I came to appreciate throwing, and I came to appreciate a man who hated to be called coach, because I didn’t fit in well with people who demanded to be called coach.” A fond Wilkins memory was Bill’s repeated injunction: “Mac, never forget. No one will ever love you as much as your mother.”
Bowerman and Wilkins quickly developed a certain collegiali
ty. In one of Bill’s PE classes, on coaching track, Mac was in the front row for the class on the javelin. Bill was demonstrating the rhythm of the five-step approach and the delayed, right-foot reverse that he called “the late cow turd.” As Mac would tell it, Bill’s demonstration “was so forceful that he farted on the plant of the left foot.” Bowerman went on as if nothing had happened, but saw by Mac’s look that he, at least, had heard. Bill’s face turned red. He hissed, “Don’t you say a word, Wilkins.” But when Mac innocently asked, “Was that the late cow turd, Bill?” they both cracked up.
In 1973, in the steamy heat in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Wilkins won the NCAA title with a meet record 203 feet 11 inches. Prefontaine concluded his magnificent college track career by fighting off sciatica and winning his fourth straight NCAA three-mile title, in 13:05.3.
At that meet, Pre’s competitors noticed a change. Stanford three-miler Don Kardong thought that the defeat in Munich “seemed to bring out the warmth that had hidden behind that veil of invincibility.” Western Kentucky’s Nick Rose, who had not met Pre before, was unnerved when he did. “I was sitting in the shade of the medical tent and Pre came up and started talking,” Rose would recall, “which really freaked me out because I hero-worshipped him.”
With the wins by Pre and Mac, Bowerman’s final varsity team placed second in the nationals with 31 points to UCLA’s 52. But Prefontaine’s service to his school was not over.
Early in the planning phase for the new stands, pledges were about $25,000 short of what was needed to pay for bulldozing the stands and architects’ fees. “Norv Ritchey had the great idea of holding a restoration track meet on June 20, 1973,” Bill Landers would recall, “that would have as its big hook our wonder child Steve Prefontaine racing Dave Wottle in a mile.”
Pre had scheduled a stint in Europe with the U.S. national team as well as a slate of Scandinavian races. He’d planned to leave a week before the fundraising meet but his loyalty to Bowerman and Oregon carried the day and he agreed to the race. Dellinger, meanwhile, made the contact with Wottle at the NCAA meet in Baton Rouge. Pre followed up with his own phone call. “Come to Eugene before we go to Scandinavia,” Pre said to Wottle, “and we’ll try for a new world record mile. I’ll lead and you’ll get a great time.” Wottle, a wait-and-kick miler and no fool, accepted that rare gift, a respected opponent setting a hard pace.